August 2017 – Page 3

Elf Nostalgia

August 23, 2017 by Grace

As if the RoboSquids project wasn’t bad enough, I’ve gone and started some additional nonsense. I guess this happened because I was in the mood for some WoW nostalgia, but we couldn’t get the RoboSquids together to run a dungeon. Instead, one of my squid-conspirators and I randomly rolled up even more new characters and started leveling. This time around it’s not so much a coherent project with rules as it is a means of scratching the nostalgia itch. I took my freshly-minted blood elf warrior and started leveling through the starting zone with no heirlooms. I sent myself some larger bags because there’s nostalgia and then there’s pointless suffering, but otherwise I’ve been trying to pretend it’s 2007 and I’m starting from scratch again.

I suppose if I wanted maximum nostalgia I’d be leveling a paladin, since that was my first real main all those years ago, and my first character to level 70. Running everywhere on foot, chasing down lynxes for their pelts and getting distracted by copper nodes is enough to spark plenty of good memories even on the “wrong” class. My belf pally wasn’t my first character but it was the first one that stuck, the first one I ran a dungeon with, the first one that joined a guild. Since those days, I’ve become a very different person and the game has changed drastically too. But those TBC starter zones are still locked in a mostly-pre-Cataclysm limbo that lets me travel back to that time for a few hours.

I don’t know how long this mini-squids project will keep my attention. I still have goals in Diablo 3 and FFXIV that are waiting, and very soon Destiny 2 will be here and vying for all of my time. I do know that I am going to keep enjoying this nostalgia trip while it lasts.

Enjoy the Path

August 23, 2017 by Belghast

The first image of the evening is what happens when you catch the daily completion bonus train. I am still floored by the sheer number of people actively participating in events. One of the cool happenings of the night though is that I organically crossed paths with @vbarreirojr who was one event behind me in the progression. I sort of love the concept that happens in this game of the commander… because you can see the telltale icons on the corners of your map and generally speaking are a reasonable indicator of where some manner of activity is going on. I’m also starting to learn to get a bit better at watching chat. Often times as new events are starting up someone will link a waypoint to allow folks to jump to it relatively quickly. Through a combination of follow the catmander and waypoint jumping I managed to knock out the daily completion bonus in what felt like record time. I think part of it as well is I am starting to develop a little ancestral memory, as to which are the best areas to harvest resources and which are the easiest vistas to view to get completion and such. It’s funny how I almost look forward to the daily completion bonus because it ends to give me some focus… and from there while participating in it I come up with some other game play for the evening.

Early in the day I was talking to a friend who is contemplating trying to restart the game, and was questioning what sequence of things she needed to purchase. Firstly I think Guild Wars 2 is either something that feels good or doesn’t… and lord knows it took me five years of trying it to finally figure out the secret to being able to enjoy it myself. You can scan back through the history of this blog and you are going to find a bunch of posts that are pretty negative about this game. I wrote one in particular where I called it one of my five biggest MMO disappointments just so you have an easy reference. You are going to ultimately have to decide if the game works for you or not, because it absolutely did not for me for a very long time. However the truth that I finally landed on is that you have to forget everything you know about how an MMO works to ultimately make Guild Wars 2 work. What I mean by that is for the most part MMOs are very task oriented and involve you completing a sequence of objectives in order to move on to the next sequence of objectives. The quest is the most common version of this and that least to more quests and ultimately provides a ladder for you to traverse a given zone with. When you attempt to play Guild Wars 2 in this fashion… your brain rebels against you. There is no quest structure and the concept of hearts are what I tried to latch onto as the replacement. The end result felt like this grindy busywork as I attempted to complete my way across a zone so that I could then move to the next area, making sure to 100% everything in my path. In doing so I kept getting frustrated each time something took me off path or off whatever my current task was, and as a result I bounced exceedingly hard off of the game.

Instead I personally find Guild Wars 2 works better if you view it like an ocean that you happen to be floating in. If you allow yourself to move along with the current you get to experience all sorts of interesting things that happen along the path. Instead of staying focused on some large overarching goal… I find it works best to focus on whatever is presented in front of you. If there is an event spawning near you, go over there and participate because it often times leads its way to other events in the same zone. Instead of trying to traverse things in an A B C D E F manner… I find it just feels better to let the zone explore itself almost. Sure you end up often times going from A to F to G to C to E and eventually back to B and D… but it is done so in a more organic manner. The only negative to this approach is that I find it completely impossible to stay on task. Ultimately I started playing Guild Wars 2 like I play Skyrim or Fallout… just letting myself wander off into the horizon and check out the next shiny object in my field of view. If there is a commander on the far side of the zone… then I should probably head that way to see what all is going on. Sometimes this has lead me to zone events that I didn’t even realize existed. To some extent at times it feels like the game is playing you… but I think in this case it is probably perfectly okay. This game is full of these extremely intricate micro objectives and feedback loops to keep you caught in their gravity and constantly doing stuff. The fact that everything scales… means that you are never going to be doing stuff that isn’t potentially valuable or lucrative. Basically my advice to learning how to enjoy Guild Wars 2 is to stop focusing on the goal… and start enjoying the path.

Saltines and Weaponcraft

August 22, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was a weird one, namely because everyone seemed to have eclipse fever for lack of a better term. As a group we had largely made a plan to go over to the roof of the parking garage next door, and by the time the festivities actually started there were between fifty and a hundred people that had the same idea. The positive is that everyone was more than willing to share their assorted ways of viewing the eclipse. In Oklahoma we only actually had about 90% occlusion, which made the world feel like a storm front was just about to blow in. The sky darkened, the temperature dropped a very small bit… but for the most part you could have easily not noticed anything going on unless you happened to look up. I took the first image with the selfie cam on my old phone and that was just about the peak of occlusion… and as you can see the day star still seemed pretty formidable. The second shot is the idea of using a saltine cracker to project the shadow, and the third shot is this awesome box that the same coworkers husband had rigged. The last shot is the eclipse through the filter of a pair of those shades… but unfortunately it was hell to get the focus to latch onto it at all. There were so many sets of shades that people were passing them around pretty freely, and I got to take more than a few peeks at the spectacle. The only problem is… my eyes felt really funny afterwards. Like in part they felt like they were strained… or like I had been driving into the sun’s glare for too long. It took about 2 hours for the effect to fully wear off, so I was concerned for a bit that maybe we ended up with some cheap knock off shades and I had done some actual damage. My eyes are super sensitive to light in the best of conditions… so forcing myself to be out and looking up… probably just caused them to strain a bit.

When I made it home for the evening I was still feeling a little off though. So my evening activities ended up leaning towards the chill side of things. Other than doing my daily completion bonus I largely focused on crafting and pushing up my weaponsmithing. I had this weird sequence of events happen where I saw my character hit 402… then somehow was back at 392. Guild Wars 2 has this problem where the UI sometimes freaks the hell out, and in order to fix it I sometimes have to log out and back in. In doing this I went from the 402 I was supposedly sitting at before I logged back to the 392, which is a bit frustrating. However since for some reason I didn’t have the pattern to Orichalcum Ingots… I am leaning to the side of this just being a presentation bug since the UI was acting up anyways. I still had the materials though to push my way through to the 400s and now everything I craft seems to take a ton of time and materials. I need to do a heck of a lot more farming of the level 80 zones because I only had the materials for I believe 64 ingots of Orichalcum. I was in even worse shape in the Ancient Wood department, so I know I will be spending a lot of time in the end game zones doing content. I am largely going down this path because I want to be able to craft my own ascended gear, and be able to craft my own exotics for the purpose of trying to gamble and get that precursor. I realize I should just focus on making a lot of money and buying the damned thing… but I have a long ways to go until I will be able to do that.

Merry Eclipsemas

August 21, 2017 by Belghast

Friday I was apparently smoking something and I decided to attempt to participate in one of those internet meme quiz things. I was planning on doing it my own way where I just made a giant blog post about it. However thankfully I did not get enough likes to actually trigger me to release the post. Side note… I did actually write it and it is sitting in my saved drafts bin but I am somewhat relieved that I didn’t hit the threshold needed in my mind to make that post. In other news today is in fact the Eclipse and while I am not anywhere near the totality… it should still be interesting. There is a big of a gathering happening on the roof of the parking garage next to work in order to celebrate it, but my meeting schedule will ultimately determine if I can attend. The only negative is that I don’t have any way to view it safely. I remember watching one as a kid, that had to be the one that happened in 1979 and my grandfather who was a welder by trade had me wear his welding hood. I have no clue how best to really watch this one… I mean I guess in theory I could do the pinhole camera thing. The awesome big is that this time we have the internet and live streams… and in theory can get a much better view sitting at the computer than we can outside. It is extremely unique though to have the feeling that it was daytime minutes before and now you are standing in darkness. There have been many warnings about not pointing your camera directly at the eclipse, but I was going to attempt this using my old phone’s front facing camera as a sort of way to know when it is safe to look at not safe to look. Dealing with the eclipse always sort of reminds me of Perseus and Medusa, and trying to use a shiny surface to get a glimpse without turning to stone… or in this case completely wrecking my eyes.

I spent most of my weekend playing Guild Wars 2 and attempted to make further progress in the Living Story Season 2 content. Before I get into that however I want to make another side note about just how damned active people are in this game. It is really hard to get the scale from a single screenshot given how much people in general move around avoiding mechanics… but I was needing to do an event in Frostgorge sound for one of the steps in the quest chain. While waiting for it to kick off I noticed a significant number of people gathering… and by the time we actually started there were a good fifty plus players participating. Over the weekend I discovered Dulfy’s boss timer thanks to my friend Solaria…. and I spent a good deal of time bouncing around and doing world boss fights. The weird thing about the Frostgorge Sound event though is that this isn’t on the timer… it is just something that happens occasionally and apparently there are enough players out there wanting to complete it that we end up with the numbers that we had each time it runs. When I first got to the zone I caught the tail end of the event and did not participate enough to be able to get credit. However during that running there were still a significant number of players participating in the content. It just floors me that there are enough players in the game that you can pretty much show up at any single event timer… and know without a doubt that it is going to happen. Now maybe during the wee hours of the morning this might not be the case but over the course of the weekend I kept hitting various encounters and each time we had more than enough to make sure it was a success.

Another big happening of the weekend is that I managed to get my Ranger to level 80. I managed to get him pretty close through the use of a bunch of Tome’s of Knowledge but I still needed to pour on the last five levels the old fashioned way. Right now I think I am pretty happy with the combo of Greatsword and Longbow for this character, and have tweaked my spec to emphasize both of these weapon selections. I cobbled together a set of gear once I dinged and am now out doing a secondary mission with the character… and that is popping between zones and taming animals. For the most part I seem to have the best luck with my traditional Arctodus and River Drake combo… but the longer I play the Drake seems to keep pulling ahead in most departments. They just seem to be universally good… reasonable dps and excellent survival. All of that said it does nothing to stop my desire to tame all of the things and have a completely filled out pet window. I’m extremely torn as to which character I should be spending most of my time on… and this is one of those moments when I wish the map progress was shared. On my warrior I managed to 100% a few new areas and am continuing down that path that I will ultimately need for the Legendary weapon madness. As far as gambling for weapons… I’ve decide more or less to stop that nonsense until I can actually craft the weapons myself. On that front though I am now in Mithril territory as far as leveling goes and considering how much of that I have in my vault it should go pretty quickly. I am however going to have to focus any of the zones that mine Orichalcum because I am severely lacking in my reserves of that metal.

The other big take away from the weekend is that I am pretty sure the designers of this game intended you to be grouping up for the Living World content. I say this because I just finished the second part of Chapter 4 and towards the end of that mission I had died so many times my character was completely naked. The thing is… it hasn’t just been that one encounter because the last few major fights have taken a significant amount of time and put me up against some extremely hitpoint spongey bosses. I am not going to go into specifics for the sake of spoilers… though I guess the above image is in its own way a little spoilery. I should in theory be grouping with friends to complete this content, but on some level I am getting a sense of pride in being able to do it all solo. Sure sometimes it hurts, and I always have to repair afterwards but it is also forcing me to actually deal with the mechanics which I am hoping will make adjusting to the later fractals all that much easier. I also in truth really need to spend some time optimizing my gear on the Warrior because right now other than the few ascended items I have… it is a little all over the place. I am hoping to push up my weaponsmithing and armorsmithing in part to help fill out some of these gaps as I am already sitting on quite a few patterns that would be useful. Long story short… still having an awful lot of fun in Guild Wars 2 and still finding tons of casual activities to accomplish.